Magic Bricks: A very Short Review:
Installation:
The game installs to C:/Games by default, but you can select your own path to install during installation if you wish. The downloaded zip file is 21.4Mb in size and when installed opens up to 49.5Mb. There is no desktop or start menu shortcuts intalled upon installation so you’ll have to create these for yourselves. If you’re not sure how to do this there’s a simple tutorial for creating both shortcuts in the games forums:
Find Creating Shortcut Tutorial HERE
I couldn’t find a web site to download a demo andcheck details of the game, so wasn’t able to write up a detailed review prior to the game giveaway this week so today’s review will be rather short.
The Game:
This is a basic match three Tetris game with single player and two player modes. There are no bells and whistles to the game, just pure game play. You can adjust the games speed by going into the settings menu and adjusting from 1 to 12. The higher the number is, the faster the blocks drop down. The maximum numbers of blocks that appear are combinations of four blocks in various shapes and colors; the lowest number of blocks is one. You can turn the blocks, move them from side to side and make them drop faster by using the arrow/cursor keys. This game is keyboard only controls. There are power ups but these are not available if you set the game speed at the slower settings, as far as I could tell from the limited amount of time I played the game this morning. There’re no details in a help me file, though one appeared to destroy the brick it touched upon impact and another destroyed a whole column of bricks. You have to arrange the blocks into the correct color, in combinations of three or more columns or rows. Creating a group of three or more will not destroy the bricks unless they are in rows or columns.
Images:
See Slideshow of Magic Bricks images HERE
Music:
If you don’t like the in game music, you can change it by replacing the files that are present in the games data folder.
D:\games\Magic Bricks\MagicBricks\GData\Music
The games music files are in the ogg format so you’ll require a suitable audio converter to convert your mp3 or WMA files. You can find a free audio converter in the freeware library:
Get free audio converters HERE
Conclusion:
If you like Tetris then this is the game for you. The game is very basic, but colorful. There seems to be a problem with the design of this game in my opinion as the single blocks fall at a constant speed no matter what game speed you set the game at. Setting the game speed at 12 is near impossible to play unless you have lightning reflexes, so maybe it is a challenging game. There are plenty of free Tetris games around so personally I couldn’t imagine paying for this game. I would score this a 5 out of 10 for game play. Not really my game as I burnt out on Tetris years ago when the first game boys were released, though I will occasionally play one of the freeware Tetris games I have which to be honest are as good if not better than this game. You can find several free Tetris games in the games synopsis thread over in the forums. These include Color Tetris, Firestones, Halloween Horror Tetris, Rhombis, Trismania, Trixx and Wordtris:
Find other Tetris games in the Free Games Synopsis HERE
You can also get a few Tetris like match three games called Gem Mine, Magic Drop and Rhombis from Gametop:
Games from gametop once closed do open your browser, but once the browser is closed there's no other hassles. If you do decide to download any games from the site be aware that some do try to install tool bars and hijack your browser; though this can be prevented by unchecking the tick boxes that appear during installation. I've also been getting pop ups occasionally that are usually rated red by the Web of Trust (WOT).